What's Next

My main goal for over christmas and in to the new year to work on a piece that I started in the summer based on aleatoric music. The piece is written for string quartet and contains a ostinato in the viola while the other instruments play various passages in a yet to be determined order. I would also like to write another piece for voice and another instrument (or multiple) but I will definitely need to work on finding some text to start this project.

Mine and Justin's band will also be working on recording a new ep in the new year.

You can check out the one we released on december 4th at www.pre-raphaelites.bandcamp.com

Year End

Another semester of composition has just about come to an end. The course this semester was definitely a good way to finish off my composition courses at memorial university. Having a smaller class to work with was beneficial for getting back more criticism and help for our compositions. The ECM performing our pieces was a great experience and really helped us with our score preparation. I particularly enjoyed writing for voice and piano. I've never written for voice before and it was a lot of fun, once I finally obtained some, to use text to write the music. Also, the fact that I could be a lot more free with the piano was a plus where as usually I end up relying too much on the piano for content.

Final composition

After being supplied with text for my piece I found the writing process to run rather smoothly. The bulk of the piece was written within a 24 hour time frame and the music was derived by the text. The words that Dave chose for this poem were rather easy to colour musically. This definitely changed the music I had written for this piece previous to the text rather greatly. I definitely think that writing with a text can help fuel ideas for a piece of music and am even considering writing my next non vocal piece with it as an aid.

Text

I finally got a text for my piece thanks to the lovely mr. Dave Goudie:

Constellations

A thread,

A pin that works its way,

Across the sky

Tells a lie,

Tells a lie,

Forming clusters here and there,

Depicting gods and men

That never should conspire,

And a crab for some reason

A bead,

A shred of logic,

Somewhere in my mind,

I can't find,

I can't find,

Shame constellations

My plan for this piece is to use a lot of extended techniques to recreate the visual imagery. The first stanza will contain a lot of pizz. on the piano strings as well as scraping and swiping. The word 'cluster' will obviously consist of cluster chords and will definitely be a word I can play off of for a bit. For the line 'Depicting gods and men' I am going to try and create some sort of god like motive to play with. Definitely something rhythmic.